Over the last few weeks, I’ve had a number of conversations with my male friends about them being called “safe,” or in one case, a “safety blanket.” Don’t know what I’m talking about? Celebrate.

This is the phenomenon in which a (generally young) woman dismisses her behavior around a guy as “Oh, that’s just so-and-so. He’s safe.” It always sounds like it’s meant to be a compliment, but there’s very little like it to bring out the bitter in a guy even decades after the fact. It took explaining the concept of “safe” to the wife of one of these friends for me to really figure out why.

Skepchickcon and CONvergence have been over for more than a week, but I haven’t gotten around to writing about it yet. Some of that is because I was enjoying our house guests instead. Some of it was because I went to TAM the day after those guests left. A lot of it was simply because I was still processing everything that happened. It was a packed long weekend.

Those who engage in sock puppetry, however, are making a raid on reputation. They’re stealing it, either by exploiting the bandwagon fallacy to accrue unearned regard for their position or by disowning the negative effects that attacking someone else has on reputation, basically shoplifting a smackdown every now and again. YNH did both.

So you’ve read my latest post on Almost Diamonds, on how poorly a gun protects you in the home, and you’ve said to yourself, “Self, those numbers are pretty far apart, but hell, that’s just robbery.” And you’re right.

We in the blogosphere very rarely seem to understand what an ally is. I’m not really sure how it happened. Allies in the culture wars aren’t appreciably different than military or political allies, but somehow, the meaning of the word has changed online. We’ve gone from “In everyday English usage, allies are people, groups, or nations that have joined together in an association for mutual benefit or to achieve some common purpose, whether or not explicit agreement has been worked out between them” to the assumption that the act of alliance comes with specific obligations and that people are “bad allies” or not allies at all if particular things are done or left undone.

They’d come to the colonies, as many had, because they couldn’t practice their brand of religion in a land where the state was the head of the church. What they found (or perhaps helped to found, as the records aren’t very clear) was a colony where the church was the head of the state, just as many would like the situation to be today.

So what does constructive criticism look like in the wild, particularly online? Essentially, it contains three elements: specificity, behavioral (rather than personal) orientation and positive recommendations for change. It sounds awfully simple for something that happens so rarely.

There’s a group of entertainers I’ve hung out with over the years. They make much of the money for their work by passing the hat, which means they have to engage their audience. Even among them, there’s a saying: “The cost of your ticket does not include a speaking role.”